How much more expensive would it be if we had the British model for health care?
As of right now I pay $17 a week from my paycheck for individual health, and dental coverage. That comes to $884 a year. Plus any co-payments for the doctor, perscription, tests, etc…etc…
How much would I pay in taxes a year for health coverage?
Don’t forget that prescription medication is heavily subsidised by the government in the UK.
I don’t know the answer to your question though.
This one has a good chance of ending up in GD I’ll wager.
I don’t know that the assumption that things would get more expensive is necessarily correct. We have whole layers of employment and procedure now related to billing and bill collecting which could presumably be lessened if we went single-payer.
There are also multiple models of universal healthcare in the world - many dozens of countries offer some variation - and you might want to specifiy if we’re looking to ballpark what it would cost to do Britain’s model or the cheapest (or most expensive) of another country.
You’d pay less for the British system, not more. The brits pay about 8% of GDP for healthcare, in the US we pay about 15% of GDP.
As it stands roughly 8% of the US’s GDP goes to taxation to pay for healthcare (ie, a little over half of healthcare bills in the US are paid by the government through taxes). That is roughly 1/4th of all tax money in the US in total that goes to medicare, medicaid, VA, scientific research, various organizations like the NIH & CDC, healthcare for government employees and tax refunds for healthcare purchases. We spend around 3.3 trillion a year in taxes and about 800-900 billion goes to healthcare.
So your figure of $884 a year isn’t correct. You’d have to add in 1/4 of your tax payments to figure out what you really pay annually for healthcare.
In Ontario, Canada, speaking very roughly, you can get an idea of the costs as follows:
About half of your income tax goes to the Ontario gov’t (the other half to the feds)
About 1/3 of the Ontario budget is spent on health care
So, about 1/6 of your income tax goes to health care.
Your income tax, of course, varies according to your income. As a ballpark, let’s say it’s 1/6 of your taxable income. In this example then, 1/36 of your total taxable income goes towards health care (a person with a taxable income of 54K would pay about $1500 for health care). For a high earner, whose income tax may be 1/3 of his total taxable income, 1/18 of his taxable income would go to health care. If his taxable income is $180K, that means $10K per annum goes to health care.
Don’t forget that provincial sales tax (between 7 and 10% in most provinces) also funds health care. So, about 1/3 of the 7 to 10% tax you pay on virtually everything you buy goes to health care too.
Again, these are very rough estimates.
The US already spends more per capita in public funding of healthcare than the UK. That is not to say that adopting a UK system will be cheaper any more than, after decades of moving a city’s commuters around on the roads, suddenly deciding to do it all by public transport will be cheaper. The US health conversion would be enormously expensive, more so even than the Iraq war: like an uninsured US citizen, such healthcare might well be just too expensive.
Does anyone have figures on what percentage of your US healthcare dollar goes towards administration costs, HMO profits, and other things that would be lessened/eliminated in a universal healthcare scenario?
Can we really say that other overhead costs would not increase as some others declined? Would Universal Healthcare but some people out on the street? Or perhaps it would require even more administrators?
According to Bill Maher there are 45 million uninsured Americans. (I’d heard ‘only’ 40 million.) Universal Health Care would be expensive, but I believe that healthy people are more productive than unhealthy ones. Uninsured people are, I think, less likely to receive preventative health care than insured ones. Thus, their conditions may not be treated until they are at a more advanced (and more expensive) stage. Thus I think that UHC would be less costly in the long run, and a benefit to the economy and to society because people would be more productive.
But initial costs vs. productivity benefits are difficult (for me) to calculate. As one of the Teeming Uninsured Millions I am in favour of UHC, and was before I lost my job. IMHO I think it’s shameful that people should not have access to the same health care as other people because of circumstances (such as simply losing a job) beyond their control.
I don’t know if you like to read …
But if this does turn out into a GD debate, it may interest. 
The short of it: although the UK system isn’t currently the best system, a universal system would put a lot more bargening power in the hands of the consumers, so to speak. If anyone thinks that is a fals conclusion of the above thread, I’ll be interested to hear. 
And then there’s the case of people like Johnny.
By making the affordability of UHC linked up with income, you’re creating a veritable class society and leave the financially vulnerable in the cold and get the strange situation where those who have a stable job at a big firm pay the lowest rates.
It’s likely that your healthcare plan is heavily subsidized by your employer. The true cost may be much higher.
I didn’t even consider that.
$884 is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want your true healthcare expenses take 25% of your tax payments and find out your employer contributions. That is going to be a rough estimate and should be about 15% of your total income.
Quite likely. We provide health and dental coverage for our employees and for a single person it costs about $3,200/year.
My employer offers full dental, medical, and vision, and I pay nothing on the premiums. My employer pays about $350/month for a 23-year-old healthy female.